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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS
ANALYSIS
THE DESERVING AND THE UNDESERVING
POOR
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Chris Bowlby
Producer: Rosamund Jones
Editor: Innes Bowen
BBC
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Broadcast Date: 15.11.10 2030-2100
Repeat Date: 21.11.10 2130-2200
CD Number:
Duration:
Taking part in order of appearance:
Will Hutton
Executive vice-chair, The Work Foundation
Author Them And Us
Mark Harrison
Professor of Economics, Warwick University
Tim Montgomerie
Co-Founder Centre for Social Justice
Editor ConservativeHome website
Hazel Forsyth
Senior Curator, Museum of London
Jose Harris
Emeritus Professor of Modern History, Oxford University
Alison Park
Co-Editor British Social Attitudes Survey
Philip Booth
Editorial and Programme Director, Institute of Economic
Affairs
Gordon Lewis
Project Manager, Salvation Army
Rod Nutten
Volunteer, Salvation Army
Major Ivor Telfer
Assistant Secretary for Programme, Salvation Army UK
and Republic of Ireland
BOWLBY: Relieving poverty has always been about much more than
handing out money. Morality always lurks in the background. If
you’re asked for money on the street, do you make an instant
judgement about whether the payment’s deserved? In recent weeks,
the morality of welfare reform has been coming to the fore.
HUNT: The number of children that you have is a choice. And what
we’re saying is that if people are living on benefits, then they make
choices but they also have to have responsibility for those choices and
it’s not going to be the role of the state to finance those choices.
SEGUE:
WILLIAMS: People often are in this starting place not because they’re
wicked or stupid or lazy, but because circumstances have been against
them, and to drive that spiral deeper does seem a great problem.
BOWLBY: The Archbishop of Canterbury worries about changes in
housing benefit or jobseekers’ allowance pressurizing the poor;
Cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt thinks parents receiving money from
the state must take more responsibility for the size of their families.
While welfare reform can sometimes seem a complex, technical
subject, its morality prompts intense public debate. And it’s a debate
now going on at all levels of society, even among those receiving
welfare.
SALVATION ARMY CLIENT: Every system has its loopholes.
Every loophole has people who are going to use it. There are people
who are just exploiting it left, right and centre. It’s so easy to do.
BOWLBY: Recession has sharpened the debate: unemployment rises,
but so do welfare payment bills. Those who say the system’s
unsustainable seem dominant.
So what lies behind this? And what might it mean in practice? This
goes a lot deeper than the latest policy proposals, and could reflect a
major cultural shift - now visible in unexpected places. The writer
Will Hutton is well known as a critic of Thatcherite economics. But
his new book, Them and Us, sets out what he sees as a much-needed
new morality, based on individuals receiving what are called their just
deserts. When it comes to unemployment, for example, he’s prepared
to reappraise the views of Norman Tebbit, long a hate figure on the
left for his suggestion that the unemployed should, like his father in
the 1930s, get on their bikes to look for work.
HUTTON: I think I share this view with almost every citizen in Britain
that people should do as much as they can to find work, and they should
get on their bike and they should get on the bus. Where I depart from
Norman Tebbit on this philosophy is that luck, circumstance and
opportunity vary hugely, and you, the individual, getting on their bike
will have a varying degree of skills and capabilities, to the extent of the
luck of the circumstance from which you came. If you don’t actually
build into the next sentence a recognition of that, then what you’re
saying is terrifying. But I share with Tebbit the view that there’s
personal agency and you want people to try. You have to manage both
world views, I think.
BOWLBY: Stress on personal agency, individual responsibility,
deserving and undeserving may to some suggest the well-to-do
imposing their views on the poorest. But increasingly influential are
those neither poor nor wealthy who resent what they see as
undeserved income enjoyed by other groups. Professor Mark
Harrison of Warwick University.
HARRISON: I think of what people call the squeezed middle. There’s
millions of working families on middle incomes who feel that at present
they’re not getting what they deserve. They look at the upper ends of
the income spectrum and they feel very resentful of bankers’ bonuses
and MPs’ expenses and so on, but they also look at the lower end and
they see many people with entitlements that seem to exceed their
contributions.
BOWLBY: You’d see this squeezed middle as a group that has the
political clout to push through a moral change against what they would
see as both the undeserving poor and the undeserving rich?
HARRISON: It’s the contested ground of British politics because it’s
not only middle income, but it’s also the middle ground, the swing
voter. So whoever wants to govern over a period of time consistently
has to attract their support.
BOWLBY: And the politician hoping to reflect such views is Work
and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith, who revealed his plans
for welfare reform to parliament last week . He speaks of a new
contract between people and state, in which assistance is provided in
return for a commitment to take work and “work hard” - or sanctions
will be imposed. It’s based on years in opposition researching what he
saw as a system leaving millions permanently dependent on state
support. Tim Montgomerie, now a well-known Tory commentator,
worked closely on that research. He’s wary of words like undeserving.
But probe a little, and the moral ambition is clear.
MONTGOMERIE: Lower income, very hardworking families are
going out of their home - this is how George Osborne puts it - at 7
o’clock in the morning to a job that is very difficult, and across the road
is someone who is able-bodied but their curtains are drawn and they
won’t be up for an hour or two. It’s the injustice - and there are lots of
them - that I think motivates more people than the cold argument to
realise that welfare reform is essential.
BOWLBY: And even if you may not like using the term ‘deserving
and undeserving poor’, it sounds like that’s exactly the kind of
distinction you want to encourage with this kind of language.
MONTGOMERIE: I think what the coalition wants to encourage is
the sense that people who do the right thing, the state is on their side,
and that they won’t be paying taxes endlessly towards families that are
never challenged to reform their ways. They need to be reassured, those
hardworking families, that the state is no longer going to tolerate people
who regard benefits as a holiday.
BOWLBY: So the moral high ground, according to this view, is held
by those in work but not well off - who see themselves as playing by
the rules while others abuse the system. Politicians listening to this on
the left as well as on the right are being reminded that welfare
systems are always a delicate balance between needy recipients and
willing taxpaying funders. As historians of British poverty know well,
every generation has to find this balance; and history, the folk
memory of life before the welfare state hangs over today’s debate .
FORSYTH: The first house of correction, Bridewell, was set up in
1553 to deal very particularly with two categories of poor.
BOWLBY: At the Museum of London, senior curator Hazel Forsyth
told me how, in the past, the poor were divided.
FORSYTH: Those who were feeble and infirm and those who through
no fault of their own had come upon hard times, as well as those who
were clearly rogues and vagabonds and an absolute nuisance. And those
were put to work, in many cases apprenticed; others transported.
BOWLBY: And always this debate about where do you draw the line
between those who do deserve and those who don’t deserve help?
FORSYTH: Yes. And of course always, always people who choose not
to work. They adopted a pragmatic solution and so, for example, they
were the first to introduce compulsory poor tax. So those who could
afford to, possibly those who were struggling even, had to hand over a
proportion of their income relative to their wealth to support the poor.
When you look at contemporary records, you can sense there is a huge
tension because suddenly if you have to pay, you then start to look very
critically at where your money is going and is it going to the right
people and is it actually being applied correctly for their best interests.
BOWLBY: What’s also striking about the history is that ideas of
personal responsibility in relation to welfare were developed by
working class communities, not just middle class moralists. Professor
Jose Harris of Oxford University is a specialist in Victorian and
Edwardian welfare - a world of friendly societies, mutual
organisations and trade union provision.
HARRIS: The trade unions of course relied on contributions of their
members and they simply couldn’t afford to be throwing money around
in an over-generous way. But it’s also that people who live in small,
close-knit communities did, certainly in that period, closely monitor
each other’s lives. And so you find these rules and regulations from the
1890s and 1900s, for example, whereby supposing you have somebody
who’s on sickness benefit, then he would regularly be visited by a
brother from the local trade union committee who would make sure that
he wasn’t working on the sly, would certainly police the consumption
of alcohol very rigorously. And there are even some trade unions where
if a member was on benefit, then another member would turn up on a
Sunday morning to make sure that if he was going out anywhere, it was
only to the chapel. I am not exaggerating. This is a real example.
BOWLBY: So there is an idea of assistance as being part of a
reciprocity, if you like; that you have certain obligations, you don’t
simply have rights and entitlements?
HARRIS: Indeed, yes, precisely.
BOWLBY: And that kind of morality then shaped the creation of the
Welfare State - or at least how the welfare state, conceived by
William Beveridge and others, was meant to work - as an insurance
based system, a contract between citizen and state with rights and
duties on each side.
HARRIS: We no longer get relief because we have the status of being
poor. We get relief because we’ve contracted into universal social
insurance. And it’s hard to imagine now that it was thought that
contributory insurance could somehow take over 99.9% of social need
with just a residual tiny, dwindling national assistance system to deal
with those that for some reason fell out of it.
BOWLBY: The assumption being that the vast majority would have
paid substantial amounts in before they might ever need to draw on
welfare payments?
HARRIS: Absolutely, yes. Looking back on it historically, it’s quite
astonishing that only a decade really after the world slump and mass
unemployment, it was thought that the problem of unemployment had
been diagnosed and the remedies had been found and that you really
could look forward to a future in which unemployment was as much a
thing of the past as say you know mass starvation was in Britain.
BOWLBY: That Keynesian utopia, with unemployment permanently
banished, would have made welfare so much easier. But it’s
continued to afflict many, often well before they’ve been able to pay
into national insurance, and so taxation-funded welfare payments
have grown substantially. Until recently Labour politicians and
voters, staunch defenders of the welfare state, might have accepted
this. That’s now largely changed. Alison Park co-edits the British
Social Attitudes Survey, which has tracked changing opinion on
welfare issues.
PARK: Since the mid-1980s, we’ve seen a steady decline in sympathy
towards the unemployed particularly and a declining enthusiasm for
spending more on welfare for those particular groups. And the key shift
point seems to be the late 1990s. So, for example, back in the late 1980s
we asked people whether government should spend more on welfare
benefits for the poor even if that meant paying higher taxes, and back
then around a half of people agreed with that view. Now that proportion
has halved to around a quarter, and that’s actually quite a significant
change over that period of time.
BOWLBY: And why do you think that change has happened?
PARK: The real clue here is the fact that the change tended to happen
in the late 1990s and it tended to happen particularly after New Labour
gained power in 1997. And our speculation is that the shift in attitudes
is very much linked to the changing rhetoric and debate around welfare
at the time New Labour gained power and the emphasis very much on
the sort of responsibilities as well as rights of welfare claimants. A
further clue is the fact that if you actually look at the views of Labour
and Conservative party supporters separately, whereas once there was
an ocean between them, from about 1997/1998, although there is a gap,
that gap has closed quite significantly and it’s mainly because Labour
party supporters have become less sympathetic towards welfare than
they were say ten years ago.
BOWLBY: New Labour politicians’ own talk of reform and constant
reference to the needs of, quote, “hard-working families” hinted at
this change, perhaps echoing those pre-welfare state trade unionists’
instincts. And Labour leaders did not simply condemn last week’s
government proposals. But there’s still great anxiety about where this
might lead as a new morality is applied in practice. Crucially, what
happens when children are involved. Even if parents reluctant to
work are seen as undeserving of help, should that affect their children
too? Conservative thinker Tim Montgomerie wrestles with the
problem.
MONTGOMERIE: There will be an impact on that household, that
family, I readily concede, but I’m also saying that there is a floor
through which no family would fall.
BOWLBY: So you’re talking about a reduction in income you’re
prepared to see, even where children are involved, but not below a
certain level?
MONTGOMERIE: Yes.
BOWLBY: Don’t you think that would be an argument that many
people would find morally very hard to accept; that the children in
effect are being punished for what are seen as the sins of their parents?
MONTGOMERIE: Well of course this is a last resort policy. Any
income that would be taken away from a father or mother would follow
a period where they had consistently failed to take work that was on
offer, that had failed to turn up to a job skills programme where they
were equipped for work. And so by the time any benefits were taken
away from them, they would through that behaviour have shown
themselves to be perhaps not a responsible parent, so it would be the
threat of taking away a certain amount of income that might be the only
tool that would actually force this person to wake up and take
responsibility for their situation.
BOWLBY: So while no-one wants to categorise children as
undeserving, some could lose out in a system designed to make their
parents change their ways. The long term aim, say supporters of a
stricter system, is to improve the prospects of the estimated nearly 1.9
million children living in households where no-one is in paid work, by
bringing their parents into employment. Will Hutton would not want
to reduce a family’s income, but does want to stop individuals from
failing to spend their welfare payments on their children.
HUTTON: One has to signal that we are happy to put our hands in our
pockets as taxpayers, to support people who’ve got disadvantages. We
also have to say yes we disapprove and we don’t like it and we think
you should make different choices because if we don’t do that, we risk
others making the same bad choices.
BOWLBY: So how does that work in practice if you are supporting a
large family that’s living on welfare and you want to send a
disapproving signal to the parents but sustain the children? How in
practice would that work?
HUTTON: You may have to require the mother to really account for
how she’s spent her money through audits and visits by social workers.
That actually the money that we are giving actually finds its way into
the clothes on their back, the food in their stomachs, and the quality of
life they lead. It’s got to go to the kids.
BOWLBY: That sounds like a modern version of those trade unionists
knocking on doors checking up on who’s been drinking. Not a role
government officials would welcome. Beyond all this lies an even
more sensitive question - if some refuse to accept the new rules, is the
ultimate sanction to cut off payment? Last week’s white paper
envisages a loss of benefit for three years for those who repeatedly
refuse to accept work or training. It’s the kind of sanction Philip
Booth of the free market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs
sees as essential.
BOOTH: People who are in receipt of benefits who can work have to
have a pattern of daily life which is not dissimilar from those who are in
full-time work - in other words some kind of work requirement in
return for receiving benefits.
BOWLBY: The logical end point of that would be that there would be
a time for those who didn’t cooperate in this scheme where you would
simply say that’s the end of your welfare payments.
BOOTH: Yes, that’s the case, and I don’t think that will be seen by
society at large as a serious problem. I think if people are going to
receive welfare payments, there is no reason why the daily life of such
people should not be significantly different from the daily life of those
who actually go out to work and earn money and pay taxes that fund the
welfare payments.
BOWLBY: The idea that “society at large” would agree with stopping
welfare payments completely makes, to put in mildly, a bold
assumption about how far public opinion has changed. Decisions
about who should be helped - and for how long - are not just the
preserve of government agencies. Many charities have long
experience of this kind of moral dilemma, and the government wants
them to play a larger role in the welfare future. How do they view the
proposed changes? I went to a Salvation Army centre in Croydon, just
south of London, run by community project manager Gordon Lewis.
FX SALVATION ARMY CENTRE
LEWIS: We have generally speaking a group of people that are
disadvantaged by virtue of severe addictions, mental health issues, but
we’re very focused on facilitating change.
BOWLBY: So it’s about finding out what the problem is and then
saying this is the way in which you can change your life?
LEWIS: Absolutely, that’s very much the point of it. What we do not
want to do is sponsor a destructive lifestyle as we would see it, so it is
very much about not just accepting where people are but trying to find
ways in which they can change their situation certainly positively.
BOWLBY: Working as a volunteer in the centre’s kitchen was Rod
Nutten. His health problems have made finding paid employment
difficult. He accepts that the welfare system has faults and abusers,
but worries that in a more judgemental atmosphere those genuinely
needing help will find themselves stigmatised too.
NUTTEN: Every system has its loopholes. Every loophole has people
who are going to use it. There are people who are just exploiting it left,
right and centre. It’s so easy to do. But at the same time if you make it
any harder, the people who need it won’t get it. It’s unfair to lump
everyone in the same boat.
BOWLBY: Also visiting the centre was Major Ivor Telfer, a senior
officer overseeing Salvation Army work across the UK and Ireland.
He’s keen on the opportunity for his organisation to offer more help
with, say, the unemployed. But he warns that making judgements
about who needs help, and what they need, is complex and expensive.
TELFER: It is a case of spending time with the person because when
someone presents for example as you’ve seen some of the clients here
today, they may be very hungry, they may be quite heavily intoxicated.
Then isn’t the time to actually sit down with them and try and get into
an in-depth conversation about their childhood or what’s led them to
that particular situation. It’s building a relationship and it’s a
relationship of trust and then people start to open up. So it does take
quite a while before we can actually go through that process.
BOWLBY: Can a public welfare system ever take that time, build
those relationships of trust you’re talking about to make that kind of
decision about an individual?
TELFER: I don’t think a public welfare system can possibly do that.
BOWLBY: Addicts, for example, present special moral dilemmas.
Many believe that by continuing to take drugs, addicts are responsible
for their own plight: undeserving. But there’s plenty of evidence to
suggest that addicts are struggling against simple bad luck - a
combination of upbringing and genetics helping to create a
personality dependent on drink or drugs. Take that view and you
might think the addicted can be amongst the most deserving of others’
support. The civil servant administering welfare, spending public
money and ticking boxes according to bureaucratic rules, may be
much less inclined to make subtle judgements about character than
those working for a charity. But whatever the approach, the state of
the local economy, the opportunities available to those on welfare, is
crucial. Those using this centre say that, even if they want to change
their lives through work, the work itself is now harder to find. I spoke
to another unemployed visitor, known here as Wolfie. (to Wolfie)
How long have you been out of work?
WOLFIE: About two and a half years.
BOWLBY: And what do you think the chances are of getting work at
the moment?
WOLFIE: From what I’ve seen down the job centre, not a lot, not a
lot. I even say to the job centre, “Is there any jobs going here?”
“Actually we’re getting rid of people.” That’s from the job centre -
they’re getting rid of people. Great and you’re asking me to get a job.
SEGUE:
LEWIS: People are losing whatever tenuous employment they have,
many of them living very much on the fringes, and it only takes maybe
even a 10, 15% cut in their wages to mean that they go from just
surviving to destitution. And I have seen a number of cases where that’s
been impacted by the credit crunch.
BOWLBY: Does it make it more difficult for people to accept your
message of you should make a change in your life?
LEWIS: It does make it more difficult because our message is linked to
you can make a change in your life and there are options available to
you. There are very real ways in which you can change your life and
you can address your situation. As those get eroded, that makes that
message very much more difficult.
BOWLBY: Project manager Gordon Lewis. What’s also striking
about the recession is that it’s hit some parts of the country harder
than others. Should that affect welfare reform too? Should its rules,
its judgements about people’s deserts vary depending on where they
live? Philip Booth believes decentralised provision and rules are
what’s needed .
BOOTH: My ideal would be to have more voluntary institutions,
mutual societies, as well as insurance companies and so on involved in
the provision of welfare and charities as well, but as a first step actually
it would be useful to give local government some role in welfare
provision. Local circumstances vary - the problem of poverty in
Crawley is not the same as the problem of poverty in the East End of
London or in the Shetland Islands.
BOWLBY: So depending on whether you lived in Crawley or in the
Shetlands, you might or not receive help according to different criteria?
BOOTH: Yes, some people would call that a postcode lottery. I would
call it postcode variation - that different areas are different and we
should respond to that.
BOWLBY: Geography now looms over much of our welfare debate -
think of the fears expressed recently that housing benefit changes will
force people out of more prosperous areas. Historians would remind
us that the old poor law was preoccupied by fears of itinerant masses
searching for charitable relief. Will Hutton agrees that geographical
variation should affect today’s policies. You need, he believes, to
recognise simple luck, including the luck of where you happen to live,
in judging people’s welfare deserts. And that could challenge
fundamentally our ideas of a national system.
HUTTON: It’s because the distribution of luck about economic
opportunity is so obvious to everybody that actually people in the South
East of England should put their hands in their pockets to compensate
the people who had the bad luck to live and be born in parts of the
country where there’s less opportunity. I mean it’s clear.
BOWLBY: If moving is difficult, and clearly parts of the country it’s
vastly more difficult to find work than in other parts of the country, is
there a case for not suggesting you’d have to have universal principles
across the UK?
HUTTON: That is a killer question and my thinking inevitably leads in
that direction. You’re right. You know you could say, for example, that
the living wage in London has to be higher than the living wage in parts
of the North East of England because you know everything is cheaper
there, not least property. Fairness leads both left and right in directions
that traditionally they’ve not wanted to think in terms, but actually a
fair Britain would be much more generous about brute bad luck. The
social insurance principle would hold throughout for universally
experienced risks, but the particularities - that parts of the country are
cheaper than others to live in - need to be respected too.
BOWLBY: You could be undeserving if you’re living in the South
East of England and claiming unemployment benefit, but deserving if
you’re living somewhere else?
HUTTON: Yes. There’s a lot of heroic assumptions in there, but in a
absolutely like-for-like individual in like-for-like circumstances, that
could be true. The trouble is that there are never like-to-like individuals
and like-to-like circumstances.
BOWLBY: There remain all kinds of imponderables. But the
questioning of welfare spending - its geography, financing and its
moral basis - is now far more searching than before. Philip Booth,
who has a strong interest in Catholic social teaching, hopes all this
means state provision will lose more and more of its central role to
other welfare providers.
BOOTH: Charity should and can be a big part of welfare provision,
particularly where people have very complex needs. And it certainly
shouldn’t have negative connotations. You know charity comes as a
result of people putting their hands in their own pockets and freely
wanting to give something in a very personal way. When we finance the
welfare state through taxes, we’re extracting money out of people’s
pockets forcibly and distributing it through a bureaucracy. I think we
should perhaps turn it round and think of the welfare state as being the
last resort rather than thinking of charity as being the last resort.
BOWLBY: Such reliance on charity would still alarm many who see
modern welfare as having banished a more arbitrary and judgemental
world of poverty relief. And for a more charity-based system to work,
it would need the better off in society, the potential donors, to be
generous and accept their good fortune. This means losing the habits
of meritocratic complacency - ceasing to assume that they deserve
everything they get because of pure individual effort. Such a change
in attitudes by the better off towards their own wealth is far from
certain. What can be detected though, says economic historian Mark
Harrison, is a permanent shift away from universal ideas of
entitlement. We’re heading towards policy - and public attitudes - that
distinguish much more readily between those seen as more or less
deserving.
HARRISON: To some extent what we’re seeing today is more towards
the idea of fairness as just deserts: you have to do something, put
something in to get something out. We are moving towards a welfare
state that is more selective and somewhat more discriminatory. There is
a direction of movement here, which is slow but moving towards
somewhat shorter shrift, more tough love, for the people that the state
sees as undeserving.
BOWLBY: Opposition to welfare reform also has its moral passion -
the prospect of, say, families with children losing income prompts
angry opposition. But the politicians proposing change believe they’re
flowing with public opinion. A world where welfare’s seen as a
contract, regions vary in their provision, charities and others replace
the state - that future would take us into very unfamiliar territory. Or
maybe it marks a return to how earlier generations approached the
problem? Perhaps, in the end, the centralised welfare state, the
payment of universal entitlements will seem just a brief phase in the
long political and popular debate about who’s responsible for poverty,
and how much help people really deserve.